Cowboy/Western vs Country Music

“Too Western for Country” is what Aspen Black heard from both her producer and the record label’s A&R department when she first recorded in Nashville in 1993. Conversely, many western radio DJ’s and cowboy gathering (festival) promoters won’t program an artist that is  “too country for western”.  But what, exactly, does that mean?  “Country and Western” was a consolidated musical category created by the recording and radio industries in the first half of the Twentieth Century, but by the second half of the century they had diverged, and Country music gained ascendancy.  In her third appearance with the Coffeyville Community College Humanities Project, singer/songwriter Aspen Black, who has been commercially successful in both genres, will explore the cultural authenticities in writing, production, and artist branding that separates Cowboy/Western music from mainstream Country music.

Bio:

Aspen Black is a touring singer/songwriter who plays guitar, mandolin, fiddle, bass, and a variety of other instruments, predominantly performing original music concerts for libraries, museums, schools, and arts councils.  When home, she teaches guitar, fiddle, and mandolin with the Junior Appalachian Musicians program, runs live sound for 3rd Street Coffeehouse listening room in Roanoke, VA,  plays in local festivals, coffeehouses, breweries, and the like, and performs oldies and folk standards at senior living facilities. Aspen performs as a solo act, as half of the Grombacher and Black duo, and in the all-female band, Redbud Road.

Following a career in mainstream country music in the mid-1990’s, while also running a successful business a horse trainer and competitor, Aspen changed her musical focus after listening to an album of Ian Tyson’s western songs. She was so taken with the combination of lyrics that depicted details of the western lifestyle that only insiders know, recorded in the then-popular country music stylings, that she made contemporary Western music, or Cowboy music, as it’s often referred to, her passion for the next 25 years.  Combining the history of settlers, cowhands, and ranchers with her own experiences as a rodeo rider and horse trainer, Aspen has created original songs and poems that reflect the historical and modern West.

Aspen won first place in the 2023 Gospel Category of the International Western Music Association’s Songwriting Contest, and she was a Top Five nominee finalist for both the IWMA’s 2023 Songwriter of the Year and the Female Performer of the Year awards. Aspen was awarded a Will Rogers Medallion in 2018 for her Cowboy Poetry CD, “Tales From the Road,” and her music CD, “Lovin’ the West” was the 2017 Rural Roots Music Commission’s Classic Western CD of the Year.  Aspen’s “Eastern-Western Cowgirl” music CD was the RRMC’s 2015 Female Country-Western CD of the Year, she was a multi-year Top Five finalist for the IWMA’s Female Poet of the Year, and her poetry CD’s, and her poetry CD’s, “Tales From the Road,” and “Invisibility,” were Top Five finalists for the IWMA’s Cowboy Poetry CD of the Year in 2018 and 2016, respectively.

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Website: www.aspenblackcowgirl.com

Contact email: [email protected]